* * *
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young had only reluctantly agreed to take the stage, with David Crosby prodding his bandmates to fulfill their commitment to entertain—or at least pacify—the crowd. It had long since become clear that Altamont was anything but a success. The sound had grown even weaker, and the crush near the stage, worsened by the presence of the Angels, made it even harder for any fans to pay attention to the band’s set.
From the second the band arrived at the speedway, the members of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young felt under assault: from the unsettled atmosphere, from the electronic music booming through the loudspeakers. Graham Nash found the music tremendously annoying, and Stephen Stills was downright spooked.
The group had only existed in its current format for a handful of months. Nash had left the Hollies to join Stephen Stills, formerly of Buffalo Springfield, and David Crosby, formerly of the Byrds, in a new band. They had been encouraged by Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records, who had funded a London recording session for the new trio. “Our voices blended gorgeously on every song,” Nash would later observe. “It was as if they knew exactly where to go without having to be told.” Crosby Stills & Nash recorded a triumphant first album, and when Ertegun encouraged them to add a fourth member, they initially balked. Neil Young had been Stills’s bandmate in Buffalo Springfield, and Stills had found him to be mercurial and frustrating. But the band needed a lead guitarist to take over when Stills played keyboards, and Young’s deft charm, and his fistful of new songs, won over his new bandmates. His presence changed what had been a melodious hippie act into something slightly heavier, slightly deeper. They played their first show as a foursome at Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre in August 1969, in preparation for Woodstock.
Woodstock was a minor calamity, with poor sound and guitars that repeatedly went out of tune, but CSNY’s hour-long set went over well with the audience. Jerry Garcia, who had played alongside them at Woodstock, had reached out and asked them to join the bill for the San Francisco free show as a personal favor. The band had been skeptical, but agreed to play nonetheless.
Stills got out onto the stage, and something about the composition of the audience, or the Hells Angels’ behavior, caused him to panic. Even as the band played its brief four-song set, he was convinced that terror was in the air. CSNY played their new song “Long Time Gone,” in honor of the assassinated Robert F. Kennedy, and Stills worried that Mick Jagger, too, would be murdered on this day. “Stop hurting each other,” Crosby pleaded with the Hells Angels, still frantically assaulting concertgoers, but to no avail. Young led the way with his furious guitar assault on “Down by the River,” but as soon as the last note began to fade, the four musicians dashed for their helicopter, in a frenzy to escape Altamont. Word had gotten to them that the Grateful Dead were no longer planning to play, and the Dead’s absence from the show they had helped to plan convinced the members of CSNY that this was no longer a show they wanted to associate themselves with.
The stage had gone silent. Injured bodies littered the crowd, and stretchers began to emerge, with the wounded passed hand-over-hand above people’s heads and onto the stage, where they could be carried to the Red Cross tent. The headliners were up now.
On their fall tour, the Rolling Stones had played with Ike & Tina Turner, and had grown accustomed to a lengthy interlude between the opening act and the headliner. Ike & Tina’s sets, capped by her stunning rendition of “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” in which she stroked the microphone stand in a mimed state of erotic bliss while expressing fealty to a missing lover, were so thoroughly dominating that the Stones hardly wanted to compete, and preferred to wait well over an hour before they went on. Ike & Tina were not present at Altamont, but the Stones’ sense of drama remained. The band preferred not to compete with the sunshine, and wanted to let the day, and the memory of the other performers, drain away before taking the stage. Moreover, bassist Bill Wyman was running late. He had spent the afternoon shopping for antiques, as he liked to do in his free time, and had missed the initial helicopter flight to the speedway.
This was to be the capper to a day of musical drama. The audience, already deeply impatient, had reached a near-frenzy of impotence and thwarted desire. They had come for history in the making, and had received—at least those in close proximity to the stage—a miserable day of discomfort and fear in its stead. If the Stones would only come on, this day could finally come to a blessed end, and everyone could proceed to forget all about what had preceded it. The Rolling Stones appeared to be operating on an outdated schedule, heightening the drama for a moment unlikely to please most of their fans.
* * *
Patti Bredehoft was hardly surprised when Meredith Hunter came back to the car to join her. This concert was a bust, and she was ready to leave, Rolling Stones or no Rolling Stones. She was dumbfounded when Hunter went over to the Mustang, unlocked the trunk, and removed a long-barreled .22 Smith & Wesson revolver with a blue-steel barrel. Bredehoft watched him put the gun in a pocket of his jacket. “Why are you getting that?” she wondered, shocked. “It’s just to protect myself. They’re getting really bad,” he told her, referring to the Hells Angels. “They’re pushing people off the stage, and beating people up.”
The couple had been among the fans terrorized by the Hells Angels’ presence. They had scurried out of the way when the Angels had roared up to the stage on their Harley-Davidsons with hardly a pause; if they hadn’t made room for the motorcycles, they likely would have been run over. They watched helplessly as the bikers used their pool cues as truncheons, beating fans who had violated the unspoken rules of proximity to the Hells Angels. Bredehoft was particularly troubled by the bland announcements that came from the stage, asking the audience to calm down and be cool. It wasn’t the audience causing the trouble in the first place, she thought.
She had never seen Hunter with a gun before, never heard him talk about weapons or any other sort of serious illegal activity. Bredehoft had spent time with Hunter at the homes of her friends from Berkeley High School, at the park outside school, and in the neighborhood. They had hung out with other high school kids, some white, and some black, but few, if any, engaged in illicit behavior. The teenage couple would drink together, would sometimes smoke weed together, but that was the extent of it. Why would he have brought a gun to a concert? And why take it out of the car now? Bredehoft could not imagine what might have inspired him.
The concert had been disturbing and unsettling, but this seemed like an unnecessary additional step. Hunter likely felt differently, though. Everyone in the Bay Area—everyone black in the Bay Area—knew the Hells Angels were unambiguous racists, and a chaotic scene like this concert could be the perfect cover for an attack on a lone African-American adrift in a sea of white faces. It was better to be protected. The gun, as he had told Dixie, was unloaded, but might be able to scare off a Hells Angel intent on disturbing his peace.
Meredith Hunter in 1969, wearing the same lime-green suit he would wear to Altamont. (Courtesy of Dixie Ward)
In retrospect, this would be one of the crucial moments of the day. The concert had been a fizzle, the violence had been unsettling and frightening, and neither Hunter nor his friends were particular devotees of the Rolling Stones. Why didn’t they try to leave then, as others who had been spooked by the presence of the Angels had chosen to do? Even their friends Ronnie—one of the few other African-Americans who had been standing near the stage—and Judy were leaving, deciding they had had more than enough of the concert. Perhaps Ronnie felt particularly vulnerable in this overwhelmingly white place, surrounded by Hells Angels intent on brutalizing innocent bystanders.
If the situation was uncertain enough to require a gun, wasn’t it smarter to simply leave? But to ask the question was to lose sight of something essential about Meredith Hunter: he was an eighteen-year-old boy. He had served time in juvie, but he was still an unformed personality. He was a teenager, not a grown man. In his mind, the gun was enoug
h to ward off any potential threat from the Hells Angels, but little thought was likely given to what the Angels’ response to seeing that gun might be.
Bredehoft wanted to leave. Altamont was no fun at all, and she was getting scared. Hunter wanted to stay, and encouraged her to return to where they had been standing. “Come on,” he gently told Bredehoft. “Come back with me. The Rolling Stones are finally getting ready to go on.” The teenage lovers walked away from the Mustang, and back toward the stage. It was now time for the headline act.
8. Gun and Knife
Darkness came early in the Bay Area in December, and with its arrival, the temperature fell precipitously. Some of the crowd had been overdressed for a warm day in the sun; now, most of the crowd was underdressed for what was proving to be a very chilly evening. It got colder here in eastern Alameda County than it ever did in Berkeley or San Francisco. All across the speedway, small tongues of fire lapped into the sky, with paper bags and trash set ablaze to provide some much-needed warmth. Across a shallow ravine from the stage, there were hills ringed with wooden fences, and fans had begun to disassemble them, tossing the fence posts onto bonfires. The air filled with the oily, acrid smell of burning garbage and creosote.
The concert’s hasty setup meant there had not been time to put up the arc lights, the assembly of which required a crane that never arrived. Instead, the boxes containing the arcs had been forgotten under the scaffolding. Now, those same boxes were being ransacked by freezing concertgoers, who tossed them directly onto bonfires to keep warm. The $7,000 arc lights burned unnoticed inside the boxes. Chip Monck, who had ordered the arc lights, would not know about the damage until they were already serving as tinder.
The wait after the end of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s set had extended for an uncomfortably long time. The Rolling Stones stayed in their trailers as darkness fell, and the crowd was left to stew, smoking joints and popping pills and sipping from bottles and cans to keep warm. The hope, unjustified by anything that had taken place so far that day, was that the star power of the Rolling Stones would be enough to calm the tensions in the crowd, to soothe all hurts with the balm of their fame. During the hour-and-a-quarter wait for the Stones, the backstage lights remained off, hampering the efforts of the concert’s medical staff to care for the injured. The lengthy delay before the Rolling Stones emerged only worsened the hostility in the crowd, and the sense of siege for those concertgoers trapped closest to the stage.
Two groups of young men faced each other, almost close enough to shake hands, or at least exchange greetings. On the one side, in their backstage trailer, a British rock group selling a persona two parts prince-of-darkness allure and one part hippie goodwill, all held together by a furious two-pronged guitar attack; on the other, surrounding the stage, a clan of California bikers, increasingly bitter over the thankless job they had been tasked with and sorely tempted to lash out violently. The Rolling Stones and the Hells Angels stared at each other from across a vast gulf, separated by mutual incomprehension. No word went between them, the Stones hoping for an improvement to the situation in the crowd and the Angels waiting for some hint of what might happen next. In the meantime, the Angels began pushing fans back anew, clearing out about forty feet of space between the stage and the audience.
Soon, more Angels came blazing in on their motorcycles, pushing concertgoers out of their way to form a path through the overcrowded thicket close to the stage. One fan, presumably thrilled by the Angels’ unbridled display of power, clapped each biker on the back as they rode by. One Angel stopped his motorcycle to take a lengthy swig from a jug of wine proffered from the crowd.
The band was still in their tiny, airless trailer, the smell of stale smoke filling their lungs as they grimly assessed the diminishing goodwill of the day. Having stayed up the entire night, Richards was drained and anxious to conclude the show. People poked at the windows, shouting and pining for a glimpse of the Stones. The band hoped to play an abbreviated set, then call a halt to the misbegotten concert and send the fans home. The Rolling Stones asked the Hells Angels to escort them to the stage, but Sonny Barger and the other Angels were turned off by what they saw as the band’s antics. Why had they waited so long to play before a clearly violent, dyspeptic crowd? Barger did not like what he saw as an unnecessary delay, intended, as he saw it, to heighten the dramatic tension on an already unbearably tense day. The Hells Angels would no longer serve as bodyguards to “a bunch of sissy, marble-mouthed prima donnas.”
* * *
Patti Bredehoft and Meredith Hunter returned from the car and made their way back toward the front, where the Rolling Stones were about to take the stage, accompanied solely by their bodyguard Tony Funches. Bredehoft was afraid of the crowds, having already seen the Angels mauling concertgoers, but Hunter was intent on staking out a spot near the band. The crowd was fierce. No one wanted to cede an inch of space. No one wanted to lose out on their hard-fought proximity to Mick and Keith and the Stones, won with an intrepid spirit and the stubbornness that came of standing in the same crowded space the day long, as the sun arced over the Livermore fields and disappeared behind the horizon. Shoves and sharp elbows met their every step, demonstrations of intent by a crowd that had endured more than their share of discomfort and downright terror in the hopes of seeing history in the making.
The Rolling Stones finally appeared, and for a brief moment, a sense of relief spread through the speedway. The Stones would undoubtedly cool off the overheating crowd, get them back to concentrating on the music, and return the focus where it belonged. “Oh, babies,” Jagger addressed the crowd. “There’s so many of you. Just keep cool down in front and don’t push around. Just keep still, keep together.” Jagger, resplendent in a red cape knotted around his neck and a ruffled orange-and-black silk shirt, had the presence, and the confidence, it seemed, to instantly reorient the crowd in the direction he wanted.
Astonishingly, the Rolling Stones were still expected, under these alarming circumstances, to play a concert, as if this were another night at the local basketball arena. Richards, his rhinestone-studded orange shirt left unbuttoned, his black sunglasses clipped to his T-shirt, fingered the opening notes of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” and the rest of the band fell in, determined to bash their way through this.
Some fans believed the band deliberately tanked its performance, hoping to deflate some of the frantic energy of Altamont with a mediocre gig, but the Stones sounded fairly solid on this night, given the unprecedentedly adverse circumstances in which they played. Bill Wyman’s bass was mostly inaudible, and Charlie Watts’s drums were poorly miked, but the night belonged to Richards, who played with a restrained frenzy.
After “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” came to its fiery conclusion, a young man with long blond hair tried to climb onto the stage, and was brutally confronted by the Angels, who swarmed around him. They punched him repeatedly, and one Angel kicked him in the face. He was soon motionless, spread-eagled on the ground, surrounded by a crowd so densely packed that there was no room for him to move, or for anyone to assist him.
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. (Courtesy of Robert Altman)
The Stones’ laid into their cover of Chuck Berry’s “Carol,” a blues rave-up they favored on many of their ’69 tour dates, and immediately followed it with Jagger chugging from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s placed at his feet. “I’d like to drink one to you all,” Jagger chuckled, trying on a broad Southern accent for size. Richards picked up on the moment and launched into the stop-and-start riff of a jagged “Sympathy for the Devil.” A young woman next to the stage longingly held up a bouquet of pink roses as an Angel glowered next to her. The flowers still looked fresh, but their leaves—the ones almost touching the biker—were already seen to be wilting.
Even the Stones’ performance could not change the composition of the toxic stew down below the stage. The audience, thrilled to spot Jagger, surged forward once more. There were calls to clear the stage of everyone other than the perfo
rmers, but the Angels flat-out refused, preferring to tell others to move. “Off the stage,” a biker, his eyes rolling back into his head, his teeth grinding, ordered. The bikers formed a wedge in front of the band, primed to leap into the crowd on the slightest provocation. The band, flummoxed in its attempts to move the bikers away, reluctantly pressed the Angels into service for the task of clearing others off the stage. The Angels’ excessive shows of force, flinging others from the stage, inevitably led to more scuffles breaking out, both on the stage and elsewhere.
The Angels, and their motorcycles, were still precariously propped up near the stage, and the crowd heaved forward once more, thousands of diehard fans craning for a glimpse of Mick and Keith. One fan kneeled on the motorcycle seat of a San Francisco Angel named Julio, and his weight shorted out the bike, starting a small fire. A thread of smoke began rising up toward the stage, and into the sky. Barger spotted the smoke from his perch on the stage and leapt off to shove the fan away from the motorcycle. Other Angels jumped down to put out the smoldering fire.
The burning motorcycle touched off the day’s severest round of violence yet. The proximity of the Angels’ motorcycles to thousands of wild fans emboldened by the presence of the Stones meant such skirmishes were inevitable. The Angels pushed fans away from their bikes, once more clearing out a demilitarized zone closest to the stage, and kicked, punched, and trampled audience members in the process. The frustrated crowd threw bottles and grabbed for the Angels’ motorcycles, only further agitating the bikers. The Angels surged into the crowd, attacking those they believed had manhandled their bikes and beating them mercilessly. Meredith Hunter was in the thick of the chaos as the Angels rampaged. He reached into his jacket pocket, where he had placed his gun, without removing anything, as if feeling for a totem of protection.
Just a Shot Away_Peace, Love, and Tragedy With the Rolling Stones at Altamont Page 14